Salsa Scoop
Grave Choices Ahead for the Netroots
I'm afraid Friday's post indulged a too-flip conclusion that's worth re-examining.
As is the case with our coterie of progressive philanthropists, it will not do to let the frisson of resistance stand in for an assessment of the terrain.
The netroots has the luxury of opposition status, and opposition to a particularly grotesque junta to boot, which leaves in its wake plenty of blog-fodder and the mirthsome pleasures of watching the right blogosphere defend the First World's very worst chief executive. That's a fine party favor, but it won't long remain tenable to withhold a firm stand on Iraq, and that issue could fracture the Democratic party as easily as -- perhaps more easily than -- the Republican.
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11:30 PM Aug 21, 2005 -
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A Vendor's-Eye View of the Cindy Sheehan Netroots
Appearances to the contrary, we do a lot more here than streaming Kintera's stock quotes.
DemocracyInAction
is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing robust and
affordable e-advocacy tools to other nonprofits. That's from the
company pamphlet, or would be if we had a company pamphlet. What it means is, it's a hell of a lot of fun
to work here.
We have around 200 clients, everything from small local arts
organizations to enormous brand-name groups. Among them, they do
a humbling array of good deeds, with an astonishing range of strategies.
Both of which bring us to Cindy Sheehan, the accidental spokesperson of
America's three-years-overdue disenchantment with the Iraqi blunder.
We're lucky enough to be hosting the donation page for meetwithcindy.org,
a site that went live less than two weeks ago and has become one of the
web's most heavily trafficked. We're also serving Operation Truth and CodePink,
and know a lot of the IT folks who have gotten involved in this amazing
netroots phenomenon. It also means we get a view of a lot of the
sausage-making.
Last week, David Swanson posted this survey
of meetwithcindy.org's preternatural gigantism. Amazingly, at the
time this post went up, the site didn't even have a donations page.
In the week since, it's gone still higher,
cracking the top 10,000 web sites worldwide and being widely featured
in mainstream media. Yet meetwithcindy finally put up its
donations page, using DemocracyInAction tools, just this Wednesday. From that time to this, they've collected (and I'm obliged to be at once vague and emphatic) a lot
... even though the page's donate button is decidedly
understated. It's a staggering flood -- but only a fraction of
the sum left on the table by not having a donate page up a week earlier.
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05:30 PM Aug 19, 2005 -
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Kintera Bleeding Signals Exit Strategy?
Kintera finally went public with the gory details, raising their projection of 2005 losses from $0.93-$0.99 per share to $1.15-$1.24 while lowering revenue forecasts from $50-55 million to $42-45 million and pushing projected profitability back from Q1 to Q4 of 2006. The market promptly battered share prices down to $2.85, nearly a third off its price just two weeks ago. If you've got the best part of an hour to kill, you can tune into their shareholder call here, or read all about it here.
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11:30 AM Aug 17, 2005 -
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Kintera Bleeding Signals Business Strategy Shift?
Kintera finally went public with the gory details, raising their
projection of 2005 losses from $0.93-$0.99 per share to $1.15-$1.24
while lowering revenue forecasts from $50-55 million to $42-45
million and pushing projected profitability back from Q1 to Q4 of 2006.
If you've got the best part of an hour to kill, you can tune into their
shareholder call here, or read all about it here.
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12:00 AM Aug 17, 2005 -
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So, What Does Congress Do With All Those E-Mails?
This post is a bit of a catch-up; a couple of weeks before we launched this blog, the Congressional Management Foundation released a report about how Congress is handling the flood of citizen e-mail.
As we've known for a while, they're struggling.
I did my time in the Capitol Hill intern factory in the mid 90's. The communication was pretty much all of the traditional variety, but here's how we handled it:
- Mail and faxes went to a back room, where a recluse spent the entire day shuffling it into various subject cubbies ("Defense," "Environment," etc.), which then went to the staffers covering that area. These in turn parsed them however they liked to get a feel for the issue, and had their interns generate the tedious blow-off replies you get when you write to Congress.
- Phone calls relating to upcoming votes generated a tally. We rotated duties and just put a mark on a sheet: Fer it or agin it. We all indulged the temptation to cook those tallies now and again. At the end of the day, we'd pass on the sheets of tally marks.
Every office is a little different, but this is not the sort of institutional agility that was going to make a rapid adaptation to a medium allowing thousands of instant communications. Nowadays, your best case scenario for an Internet campaign is that it's handled like those phone calls and tallied, or at least approximated.
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10:00 AM Aug 12, 2005 -
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